How to Create an Employee Training Course with SmartSuite + Softr

When a new team member starts at your company, would you rather have all of your team members stop being productive to teach that new team member every single time there's a new one? Or would you rather have a written guide that explains the basic information a new team member needs to know so that way that new team member can learn, but your existing team members can keep on doing what they gotta do? In other words, would you like to spend time once building out training so that way you can save time every time a new team member starts? Yeah, it's a pretty obvious choice, isn't it? So that's why in today's video we're going through step by step how to build this kind of employee training portal, center learning thing. Yeah, that's, that's the technical term. The way we're going to do that is through a step by step tutorial here. But to follow along with me, you're going to need two free. Read that free software. We're going to be using free features for this. But of course, if you're using the paid versions of either of these tools, you can push this so much further and hit more users. It's really great. But can you. But the two tools we're using today are the sponsor of today's video. First, SmartSuite. This is going to be our database, our information, the stuff where we actually put the course content. That's SmartSuite. The second tool we're going to be using today is called softr. It is an interface builder tool that allows us to take our SmartSuite data, put some permissions and fancy stuff on top of it and make it feel more like its own dedicated website or app. These are our two key ingredients. And in addition to those, we're going to just use a little elbow grease and creativity and we will build out the. This beautiful thing with that. Let's get started. Now, in order to teach people information, we need to actually have a spot to put the information we want to teach. Otherwise, how will that new person get it into their brain? So that's why we're going to start out by building a training library. It's not as scary as it sounds. I'll show you. So to build out this library, we could really use any kind of spreadsheet or database tool. But in this case, I'm going to use SmartSuite because it'll make the setup a whole lot easier and I can already use it to organize a bunch of other areas of my business inside of SmartSuite. Here I'm going to click Add New Solution and start with Template. Please note that there is also an AI generator option here. So as we're going through, if you realize I really want a special version of this, SmartSuite could create that for you from scratch if you'd prefer to do it that way. But I'm going to go ahead with a template here and I'm going to search for the Employee Learning template. Then I'm going to click Use Template to install this into my account. So here we have the Employee Learning template that we get right from SmartSuite. I need to make a few custom customizations to make this as fancy as I want it to be, but this is a fantastic starting point if you're looking to start organizing your training resources. Just having this template alone will probably save you about 20 to 30 minutes. So if you haven't already, use my affiliate link in the description below and sign up for a SmartSuite account. You can access this exact same template I'm mentioning here and you can then follow along with the next pieces as we start customizing this. So I'll give you a second to do that. Okay, so once we have this set up or you're recreating it manually in your own tool of choice, let's just do a quick tour of the data we have in place. The first one I'm going to look at is resource libraries. If I just click on one of these things, which is called a record, it opens up and shows me a bunch of details. These details or fields are the information we have around these general resources. So what do we have here? We have name, type of resource, author, how long it takes to consume it, description, and then how this connects to courses. So these are just kind of our catch all pieces of information. We'll be talking more about how to fill in this learning library later on, but I want to show you this so you have a visual of what does it mean to have a resource. I'm not going to modify the resource fields at all. I think this works pretty darn well for most of us. So if we open up one of these courses, we see quite a few of those similar fields as well as some fields that connect or link over to employees. Now we're going to be going into our employees table, this thing over here in just a moment. But what you need to know at this point is this employees linked Record field is connecting our two tables together. Our two spreadsheets are talking to each other here. So here I can pick which team members are enrolled in this course looks great. Next thing we have description. Then we have again those resources. What resources are connected to this course? Just like we saw on the opposite end, this is again one of those relational fields. Meaning rather than just typing things in like we have right here, we're we're actually connecting one thing in one spot, one thing in another spot, and saying, hey, these two things, they get along really well. Keep them together. That's what these fields are telling us. All right, so our final table or final spreadsheet that we're just going to tour to let us know what our library looks like is the employee one. Now, if you haven't gathered by the name, unlike our other tables, this is not a table of information. This is just the table of our humans. We're not learning the employees, we are the employees. So this is just our tracker to keep track of which employee took what, which course and which course should they take next. Right, that's what this is for. So in here, if I open up any of these records here, we can see new fields. These are quite different than the other ones we saw. This is more focused on humans. Are they currently an employee? How do we connect with this person? What information do we have on this person? And again, those connections. This is the opposite side of those linked records we already saw. We're actually going to doll this up a little bit, but before I do, I want to just show you a visual of how this information connects using the data schema widget Inside of SmartSuite here. If anyone is curious about this. What I did is I just created a dashboard view, clicked add widget, and we are just using the data schema widget right here. And this is what it gives us. It shows us how fields those linked records are connecting between. So we can see that courses are connected to learning tracks, link to employees, is connecting to link to courses, and so on and so forth. This is the visual way of mapping those connections that we've already talked about. Are you with me so far? Maybe, maybe not. Because we're going to take this now and we're going to crank it up a notch or two. We're going to add a few fields in, give us some more features about tracking you. Good, good. So we're going to go back to the employees area. I'm going to open up our friend here, and the first thing we're going to do is add the manager information, because currently there is no manager listed in here and I would like to know that information, particularly when we're building out a learning portal because I want to make sure that manager can see and monitor the learning that their direct report is going through. And if I don't have that in here, I'm not going to be able to use that information for my app I'm building later. We need to tell the computer what it needs to know. So in this case I'm going to go into maybe the general information area. I'm going to click insert new field. I can click that anywhere, but for me I'll click right here and I'm going to type in Linked record. That's right, we're doing another one of those linky ones. This time I'm going to call this manager and I'm going to connect it to the exact same table I'm already in. So I'm going to go through the dropdown, select the exact spot I'm already in. I am not going to allow multiple fields here because I want to make sure everyone only has one manager. I am going to create a backlink saying this is a two way relationship and I am going to require an entry in this field moving forward. Then I'm going to add field. Once I do, I'll see this appear. I'm going to go into the action menu here, modify those field settings and just change how this looks because to me it's a little bit too big and I want something a little bit more petite. There we go. Finally, I'm going to change it to span just one column. And now we are ready to connect Camilla to her manager, Sophia. Perfect. Now we've got a few more edits. If I scroll down under the employee information. I'm not the most excited about these two fields we have here for two reasons. One. One is because the names of these feel like, I don't know, they don't really make a lot of sense. What are they telling me? Link to. Link to what? Why? What does that mean? Ah, scary. Let's rename them. I'm going to rename both of these to be more descriptive to say what they're actually doing. In this case, I'm going to change the first one to say my learning tracks as opposed to link to learning tracks. And for link to courses, we'll do my courses. I'm going to update field. All right, now that we have that, I'm going to get a little bit nerdy and we're actually going to add two more fields. I know challenge mode if you're a new SmartSuite user, but trust me, it's not that bad? Just follow along. I'm a bit of a nerd and I want to know not only what courses Camilla is involved in, I also want to know did she finish them or not? Because we all know how that goes. This ability is something that's really hard to do if I just connect it. Because right now I'll connect it. Sure. It's linked. That's it. I can't necessarily say, ah, how far along is Camilla? So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to duplicate this field. I'm clicking on the three dots and duplicate and I'm going to rename this field Courses Complete. What this is doing is giving me one field to track courses this person is interested in or really should take and another field to track. Hey, what courses has this person actually finished? I can also do the same thing for up here at the learning tracks level. But I'm going to keep it simple for now and just focus on course tracking. What do you have to do? What have you done now? Because again, I'm a nerd. We're going to do one more thing here. We're going to count. Use a math formula here to report on the difference between these. So we're going to click on plus. You can click plus anywhere. Clicking on the bottom for me. I'm going to write formula. Turn on the advanced editor. Don't let it scare you. It's not actually that bad. We're going to search for the word count and click it. Then we're going to select our first field of total courses. This person is in my courses. And again click. Just click on it. I'm going to click on the other side of the cursor. Click minus and you know what's happening next, don't you? Yep. We're going to click count again and we're going to look up the count of courses complete or should be completed. Oh well, we'll go for it as is in English. What this formula is doing is counting how many courses do you need to do and of those, how many have you actually done? The difference, which is what we're subtracting here, is the result of the formula. So we're going to call this formula Courses remaining and click add field. So how did that part go? I know for some folks this might be a little overwhelming. Records, tables, fields. What if you need a brush up on these kinds of smartsuite terms, check out the playlist up above with some beginner friendly tutorials about how to use SmartSuite. If you are with me, though. Awesome. No need to pause the video here. So now we need to fill in our employee training library. We've got three ways to do this. First, we buy courses. We could enroll our team in ProcessDriven's how to SmartSuite training course, and we could put that in our library for whichever team members have licenses. Or we could Sign up for LinkedIn Learning and we could put that inside our library. That's your first option, which is essentially shopping. The second way to fill in your library, which is the one I would suggest to every team out there, is to observe yourself. So the next time you're taking a new hire through your business and they're asking you questions and you're teaching them, or they're just shadowing you, whatever, everything you talk about, have that new hire write down for you. Even if it's just bullet points, tell them to write down what you tell them. Essentially, that real world experience is you capturing your training process. And yes, it also doubles as them taking notes while training. It's perfect for more on that strategy. We actually have a whole video up here about how to hire without SOPs, and it's all about using this strategy really well for all parts of process building. That's your option number two. Third option, which may be the easiest for this moment, is to just steal from other people, get inspiration from other people's learning libraries. So in that vein, I'm just going to go ahead and list some of the items that we really enjoy at ProcessDriven having in our learning library, and you can steal them if you want to add them into yours. Okay. First one is core values. We have a document that writes out our core values and what they look like in real life and what they mean we can't do in real life. Then we have a what we sell document. It goes through our offers, who they're for, who they're not for in the transformation of each of them. Third, we have our customer avatars. We have three different avatars with names, nicknames, personalities, psychographics. We put them all in this document so people can understand the types of people we work with. Number four, we have a brand voice and brand guidebook. So we've got visuals, fonts, colors, brand marks, tone of voice, all that stuff thrown into one big old brand doc that we put inside our resources area. Next, we have a meeting and communication guide which basically breaks down particularly for new team members, how we approach meetings, what an agenda looks like, how to be prepared for a meeting, what note taking looks like. And all those kind of anxiety inducing things, particularly for new team members who aren't used to our very low meeting culture. Number six, we actually have our own courses. So I mentioned before we have a course on how to smartsuite. We would have our users, if they were using Smart SmartSuite, go through our beginner course to learn how to use the software that our whole team runs on. So that way they can actually get organized in their day to day. Number seven, how to submit time off. This is actually an sop, a standard operating procedure, but we put it inside our training area for new people who are getting onboarded, just because time tracking really tends to mix people up, especially if they're not used to time tracking in the way that we do. Next up we have a tour of our workspace. So we have a video file where we go through. Here's where each thing is in the account to just help you get used to our work management software. Next we have a company origin story where you can actually read up on how the business came to be. What's the founding story? What services did we used to offer? What's the history essentially in one quick story? Next up we have a human resource handbook, which is more of a reference file, but we would have that inside of some kind of onboarding and training course so folks can review all of our detailed policies around travel time off, wellness days, Internet stipends, home office reimbursements, and all sorts of detailed stuff like that. And finally, if we have someone going into an established role that we've already had somebody in before, we would give them a collection unique to them of all of the SOPs and processes that their role is responsible for that basically gives them the entire playbook of hey, here's how to do your job. This isn't something that you would probably have in your training library for all users, but if you are rehiring for the same role again, this is a really nice addition to add on a one off basis. So those are some examples of resources that we really enjoy on our own onboarding and training flow. If you have any examples you'd like to add, I would really love to hear them in the comments because I'm sure I'm missing something. So, all right, let's move on. Now, most people at this point would probably say case closed. I built out my employee training library. I've got resources, I've got courses. Things are looking great. This is amazing. Case closed, closed. But you're not like the average person, are you? I have the Feeling that if you're watching this video, you might be a little bit of an overachiever. Yeah. Okay. In that case, let's take this up a notch and not just take our information and hope people will navigate our courses, but let's actually take this SmartSuite database, our SmartSuite library, and let's kick it up a notch by turning it into a full featured online course platform. Yeah, okay, let's go overachieve. So that's why we're going to be adding one more layer to this little cake that we're building together and we're going to be adding on softer, using their free plan to give us kind of an esthetic layer on top of SmartSuite to allow people to log in, view their courses, have that online course experience. And yes, we can even allow our managers to modify the information inside of SmartSuite from this interface layer. Just a reminder, you can get the SmartSuite template I'm using here as well as start playing around with software that I'm featuring this video by using the links in the description area below. Need any help with those? Just drop a comment. Once you use the affiliate link in the description below and sign up for your software account, you're going to see something like this appear and all I want you to do is click on + new application and we're going to click Blank Application because we are going to get custom today inside this modal. It's going to ask you, hey, what kind of pages of an app would you like to build? This is probably going to look like a foreign language, so just trust me when I tell you we're going to just uncheck these three sign up form and user profile and keep the other five. We can always change this later. So if you clicked ahead too fast, don't sweat it, we can catch back up. From here you're going to click Create Application. Once you do, you're going to see something like this appear, which is softer's not so clean clean slate for you to start working off of. Inside this page, the main things you need to keep an eye on are that left sidebar, this is where we can actually adjust those pages that we selected at the beginning. So if you clicked one too many you can delete them. Here we can adjust the overall look and feel of what we're building. In the Themes tab we can give users access permissions and controls on the Users tab and we can adjust some fancy things over there. On the Settings tab we have the capability in software to build Beautiful things. But unless we connect these two tools together, it won't really serve our purpose. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over to the pages and then the list page and I'm going to select my dynamic block here. All that means is information and softr that's able to connect to something else. If we click on any such block, like this one right here, we can go over to the source area and select our SmartSuite account. If your SmartSuite account doesn't show up here yet, just click Add Data Source and you just log in to your SmartSuite account. It'll connect right away. Once your account is connected as a source, you're just going to choose the workspace and solution that Employee Learning template is in. Then you're going to choose which table of information you want to feed from. This is just asking you, which database do you want to show here? For me, I want to show courses. I want this to become my course library page. So by setting this up as our data source, the stuff that shows up here once I save and refresh and all that magic is going to be the same information essentially as what we have over on the courses tab inside our SmartSuite account. It'll just look a little different. Below this, we have the option to filter what we show. Say we only want to show courses that are currently published or courses that are assigned to you, or courses that are available to managers and you're a manager. So there you go. We can filter this down further. However, before I can get fancy with this, I need to teach softer. One more connection here. I need to tell softer who are my users? How can softer know who is a manager, who is an employee? Which course does Camilla have? How can it know if we don't tell it? And so we're going to take a little sidestep here and go over to the Users tab. We're going to choose Sync with Data Source, which sounds fancy, but it just means look at SmartSuite. Click that button there and we're going to connect our SmartSuite account to the user area. Again, select your account, once again, select your workspace solution. And again, table. This time we're choosing the table for employees. Right, Right here. Once we have this connected here, we need to tell software how to connect itself. So what fields in the employee area? Map to user fields in softer. So you're basically going to click on the dropdown and find the one that makes the most sense. In this case, email means email that makes sense. Name makes name. That makes sense. Next up, we have Avatar or the profile picture in Softr. Well, we don't have an avatar field in our SmartSuite, but let's see what we do have if we go to employees. Look, we do have an image field. It's called Photo. So we'll go over to Softer. We'll look up Photo. We'll repeat this for every field. Once we click Connect, it's going to start doing its magic up here with the syncing users. While we wait for that to do its magic, we're going to hop over to the User Groups tab. And this is where in Softer, we kind of set up access levels for the app that we're building. We already have access levels to some extent inside of SmartSuite, but when it comes to software and building out this custom learning portal, we kind of want a different experience for managers versus employees. I said at the beginning it'd be really cool if managers could review their direct reports, progress or contribute a new course. Those are features that I want certain people to have inside of our little web portal thing here, but it's not something I necessarily want everyone to have. And having that kind of permission set up is what I can do with user groups. So here I'm going to create a user group and I'm going to call it Managers. Going to click next. And here I could base the access to this group on fields inside of SmartSuite. I could say something like, if the department is leadership, then blah, blah, blah. Or if they have the relationship of direct reports, blah, blah, blah. In this case, I'm actually going to head back to SmartSuite. I believe we have a field called Title. Yes. So I'm going to say if someone has the title of Manager, that's when I want them to be in the softer groups. Going to do Title is Manager. Then I'm going to make them inside this access group. Then I'm going to add a second group called Employee. In this case, I just want to choose anyone where the title is not Manager. And again, I'm going to click Save. I could add more conditions here if I wanted to make a lot more groups, but for now, I'm going to keep it simple. All right, so this took about a minute or so. Let's flip over to our User tab and see how our progress is going. Ah, there we go. Our users are coming over from that SmartSuite sync. Awesome. And it'll automatically keep this in sync as our SmartSuite data changes. We can Even add users here that then add into SmartSuite. It's kind of a two way magical connection there, which is good to go. Now that we have these two groups in place, we can start setting up our website so it looks and feels differently based on the group someone's in. So let's go back over to the users tab, check our progress. Looking pretty good. Most, if not all of our SmartSuite data has now come over. Yep. So six employees. Six employees. Perfect. It's all here. Now we can actually start building, which is the fun part. I'm going to go over to our homepage here and I can start building out an entire website or app interface that shows me my SmartSuite data, shows me my training courses by taking the blocks over on the right side, clicking plus and then customizing it in the center of my page. Now, I already did an in depth video where I talked about this side panel and how to customize each of these pieces inside your software app. So I'm going to skip over that for this one. If you want to see that video, go up here and watch the other video we did on that feature set. So for now we're just going to skip past this and I'll just build it out for you. Quick reminder, if you're enjoying this video, it costs you nothing to like and subscribe. But it does buy you my undying gratitude. So, you know, for what that's worth, please, please, please help me out. All right, back to. All right, so it took a few minutes to polish this up and here is what we have. We now have a homepage that welcomes people to the training center if they are not yet logged in, which is what we see by this little icon here. It'll prompt them to log into this portal. If they are logged in, they'll have the button to go right to my courses. My courses is a page we now have set up that will show users just the courses inside of SmartSuite that match their user. AKA is connected to their user back here over in SmartSuite land. So here we see Camilla is connected to these two courses. Those are the two courses she will see inside her software account thanks to some conditional filters we can have here. If I were to click on any of these courses, it would open up the course details page, which is over here, which shows me the information or the contents of of the course based on what I put inside of SmartSuite. This information is the exact same information we have inside SmartSuite. So whatever we put inside this Course here will show up. So this description could be a really good area for us to actually provide all of our course information, our videos embedded anything we wanted to do which show right under this Course Details page. Now you might notice that there are actually three different top navigation bars inside my app right here. And that's because I have two different navigation bars for logged in users. You see, if I click on this very top bar and go to the Visibility tab, I am just showing this top navigation to employees. But if I go to this third one here, this is also showing to employees logged in users. But only those that are in the Manager user group will see this extra bar which has its separate tab in it called My Direct Reports. That takes you to the My Direct Reports page which I created which shows them a list of all of their direct reports and where they're currently at inside the Learning Journey. From this page, managers and managers only can add new direct Reports, update employee information, and even download a report of what they're seeing from this view. If this hasn't quite sunk in yet, all of these different buttons of actions you see are actually manipulating the information we see in SmartSuite. So Softr is not just layering on top and building that app layer, it's also allowing us to modify our SmartSuite information. So you see here add New Direct report. If I click on that, which is the control behind this button, it's actually adding a record inside of my smarts account. When it's done, that new record will show up inside of SmartSuite. Same over here with this update employee info area. If I go into this one, open it up once again. What I'm doing is updating my SmartSuite record. I click here, I'm all inside a software, but I'm actually editing the data that's over here inside of SmartSuite. This allows us to have our SmartSuite database right where all of our work happens all in one place, all nicely organized, as well as having this really beautiful outer layer that gives us this kind of custom LMS Learning Online course experience. All connected together thanks to softer and SmartSuite's integration. Now I've barely scratched the surface on how you can actually beautify the software experience by adding in a custom name, giving in an icon, so it really looks like its own standalone website. But for more on that, you can watch my other tutorial up here where we go into more detail around the beautification settings. But all of these bells and whistles can really be added on down the line. And if you're watching this video right now, I would encourage you to just take one action one step further. If you are not even sure if employee training is right for you, go ahead and just try. One step of starting to write down your training as you do it. If you already have your employee training written down, take the next step of putting that training in one comprehensive spot, such as the SmartSuite employee learning template. Again, link in the description. If you already have that set up, then let's go a step further. And rather than just throwing this pile of information at your team members, set up a softer portal using the affiliate link in the description below and build out an interactive learning experience that feels more like an online course or game and less like just throwing them an encyclopedia. If you've already done all of that, well then let's worry about that next step of beautifying that website. Making it gorgeous. Making it something even Fortune 500s would be drooling over. And obligatory disclaimer. If you're watching this and you're thinking, wow, all this software stuff sounds really, really hard. As much as SmartSuite and softer can really help you in this journey, I just want to remind you that at the end of the day, it's your process, it's your system, it's the actual knowledge you're capturing that is really worth its weight in gold. If everything I'm telling you right now just feels like way too much and overwhelming and scary, start simple. Just start writing things down. You can always take those post it notes and turn them into something like this down the road. But what matters is that you start capturing your knowledge before you forget that knowledge and you have to start all over from scratch in the future. Okay? So just commit to one little step. But in the meantime, if you'd like to learn more About Softer and SmartSuite, check out this video here on the end screen where you can figure out how to set up SOFTR not just as an employee training resource, but as a client portal to help organize and consolidate those customer communications. Until next time, enjoy the process.